College Ready

I have begun a change in life related to my career in education.  Upon retirement I felt like many and could not really stop working.  I concerned myself with education issues and worked as a substitute, did some post retirement work as a school librarian, attended conferences on the brain and learning, spent some time working for PBS Teacherline, taught an online University course, did some contracting at a charter school and started this blog.  I developed a belief that kindness and cooperation are the missing ingredients in education.  I read Nel Noddings' Happiness and Education and concluded that she is right, we have worried too much about the technical side of education and not enough about the social emotional growth of the young people in our country and the goal of education should be to learn how to be happy.

As I have been going through my various stages of retirement education reform has been proceeding full blast.  Predicated upon the perception that our children are not prepared for the future and worries that other countries beat our scores on standardized tests it seems as though my generation of educators have utterly failed.  This has been a constant moan since I began teaching.  The public schools are failing our children seems to be a consensus that has been building for a certain portion of the U.S. population.  They want to replace our community based local control of education with school choice.  Schools whose only responsibility are the students they are teaching.  This seems to me a narrow view of education and seems to undermine the value of learning cooperation, diversity and common societal values.  It feels to me that the basic premise of this movement is if you don't like it, go somewhere else.  I always thought the American spirit had something to do with working through problems by finding common ground.  My ideas of kindness, happiness and cooperation don't seem to be the thinking of the educational establishment nor society in general.

So, I have decided to become a participant in education as opposed to being a proponent for any particular pedagogy.  I hope to experience the same college education our recent graduates are getting.  Of course I can not afford to go to Harvard, but I did obtain a scholarship for Vietnam Veterans sponsored by the state of New Mexico and I have enrolled at the University of New Mexico  as an English major studying creative writing.  I am starting over and trying to develop a second career as a writer, an idea that began with this blog and blossomed when I self published Bombs Away Buckaroos.  These projects have made me realize I never had training as a creative writer and have much to learn.  So, I have a goal but along the way hope to share my observations of the capabilities of my classmates and the quality of my education.

It has been an interesting two weeks but my overall impression is positive.  If we failed these students, then we failed my generation.  The students who go to the classes I do are interested, mostly do their work, seem to be future oriented and introspective.  They are certainly young adults who have the same problems all young adults have had with the meanings and problems of life in our culture.  My creative writing class is full of young minds who understand what they are asked to do and seem capable of doing it.  My first impressions of their writing is that they are no better or no worse that the students I attended with in 1965.

We will see.  I hope to report my impressions and share some of the work I am assigned as I progress through the beginning of the final third of my life or hopefully the 3rd quarter.  It sort of depends on having a healthy body and engaged mind!

School Improvement Grants

I read Jonathon Kozol's book Savage Inequalities many years ago and still wonder why we have not developed programs to turn our inner cities and their schools around.  I remember talk about enterprise zones and throughout my career people have acknowledged the sad conditions people in inner cites endure, yet nothing seems to have been done to help bring dignity and humane conditions to these areas where many of most needy children grow up.  That is why I wonder why the current reform movement is so intent upon creating conditions to punish all schools for failure when we need to marshal our resources to help those who live and go to school in intolerable conditions.

Yesterday the U.S. Department of Education news releases reported that a handful of states are receiving School Improvement Grants to turn around their persistently lowest achieving schools.  This seems like a really great thing to do.  Unfortunately the states must present one of the following plans for these schools to receive the money.

• TURNAROUND MODEL: Replace the principal, screen existing school staff, and rehire no more than half the teachers; adopt a new governance structure; and improve the school through curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies.
• RESTART MODEL: Convert a school or close it and re-open it as a charter school or under an education management organization.
• SCHOOL CLOSURE: Close the school and send the students to higher-achieving schools in the district.
• TRANSFORMATION MODEL: Replace the principal and improve the school through comprehensive curriculum reform, professional development, extending learning time, and other strategies. 

These steps constitute doing more of the same old thing.  The problem is not the schools nor the teachers, it is the condition in which many of these schools operate and the despair within their communities.  These grants are another opportunity to turn America's public schools over to corporations and privatize education.

I firmly believe that any child can receive the best education in the world at almost any American public school.  It is the responsibility of the adults in the community and the governments that support those communities to provide  models and the ethics of success for their children.   This can not be done if the adults, children and the community are in states of stress and disrepair.  Let us solve the problems for our children and not pander to political whims.

Illiterate America

The battle for literacy is being fought in our classrooms daily, but the true cause of illiterate America is not being addressed by endless hours of reading instruction.  Just as the innumeracy will not be defeated by hours of solving long division problems.  The problem is not our inability to read or compute algorithms, it is our inability to make meaning of the information we read.  As I follow the news about our diverse political thinking it seems as though everyone believes what they hear if the information comes to them from someone with whom they agree.

I had this problem when I was teaching online.  I taught a basic research class for college freshmen who had just finished a course in writing opinion papers.  Many of my students could not make the switch to writing an objective paper.  They were out to prove their point of view and used research from sources that agreed with them rather than searching and reporting on all points of view on their topic.

I fear this type of thinking is becoming epidemic with the Internet.  I regularly receive informative emails from people who want me to agree with their point of view.  They regularly use information that comes from unreliable sources and pass it on as if it were true.  One of the emails that sticks in my mind concerns Jane Fonda.  She is hated by many Vietnam veterans and other patriots who periodically pass on information about her behavior during her visit to N. Vietnam.  No matter how reprehensible her behavior was, most of the information has been refuted by those whom she reportedly harmed.  A quick check of different sources on the Internet shows much of the information in these emails to be false. 

It seems to me our failure in schools is not that we do not teach our students to read, it is that we do not teach them to discern propaganda and rhetoric from fact!

National Standards

There are many movements to reform education and many of them do nothing to develop creativity.  We are in a race for high scores in reading and math at the expense of creativity. Recently, Governors and state commissioners of eduction developed a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades k-12.  According to their website,    

These standards define the knowledge and skills students should have within their K-12 education careers so that they will graduate high school able to succeed in entry-level, credit-bearing academic college courses and in workforce training programs. The standards are:

• Aligned with college and work expectations;
• Clear, understandable and consistent;
• Include rigorous content and application of knowledge through high-order skills;
• Build upon strengths and lessons of current state standards;
• Informed by other top performing countries, so that all students are prepared to succeed in our global economy and society; and
• Evidence-based.

Now the question is what exactly does the government want to do with these standards?  The Wall Street Journal on its editorial page sees national standards as a distraction from the work of firing teachers and handing out vouchers, but more importantly pointed out that monies from the Federal Government could end up being withheld for noncompliance

 With the Administration's blessing, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers have proposed a set of uniform K-12 math and reading standards for all states. Compliance will supposedly be voluntary, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan said states that support the effort will have a better chance of receiving Race to the Top money. And President Obama suggested that states that opt out risk losing millions of dollars in Title I grants for low-income students.

 I was raised in an Air Force family and we moved a lot.  I certainly see the sense in having national standards.  As a youngster some states were ahead of others and there was always a fear of being setback when your family moved to a new duty station.  However, as an educator I am in agreement with Tamim Anasary in Edutopias article From Education at Risk:Fallout from a Flawed Report

 Only on-site teachers can really make a broad ongoing assessment that gets at a range of achievements and takes the individual into account. By contrast, uniform standardized testing whose outcomes can be expressed as simple numbers allows someone far away to compare whole schools without ever seeing or speaking to an actual student. It facilitates the bureaucratization of education and enables politicians, not educators, to control schools more effectively.

NCLB has left a bad taste in my mouth for federal education mandates and I am fearful that the common core standards could become another mandate.  Just as we are a mobile society and need some standards across state lines, we are certainly a republic and our states and communities have aligned their education product nationally by adopting common curriculum created by educational organizations and through state development of benchmarks and standards.  Education corporations, specifically textbook companies have  gathered that information and created curriculum for our country.  Seems to me that is free market capitalism at work.

My  true fear is that as we work to create educational reform we are taking away the strength of our country.  The ability to create and innovate are not being encouraged in our schools.  Teachers should have the ability to create lessons based upon the needs of their students and local situations.  Children should be encouraged to explore and learn what interest them without being stuck in a timeline of instruction.  Unfortunately all of the reform to date is really based around the philosophy that teachers do not know what they are doing and the national standards are another method to undermine their authority and expertise.

Is ADD truly a disorder?

Take a look at the website Born To Explore, if we are going to create a culture of kindness and inclusion perhaps it is time that we think about all children in a positive way.

"I'm alarmed that to think than modern science may be turning creativity into a medical disorder" - Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., from "The Myth of the ADD Child."

 Excerpts from an "Are you ADD" list,
from "Driven to Distraction" by Hallowell & Ratey.

1. Are you more creative or imaginative than most people?
2. Are you particularly intuitive?
3. Even if you are easily distracted, do you find that there are times when your power of concentration is laser-beam intense?
4. Are you usually eager to try something new?
5. Do you laugh a lot?
6. Do you get the gist of things very quickly?
7. Are you much more effective when you are your own boss?
8. Are you a maverick?
9. Do you tend to approach problems intuitively?
10. Do you often get excited by projects and then not follow through?

Book Review

Disrupting Class:  How disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson

The basic thesis of Disrupting Class is that we all learn differently and technology can help to capitalize on that neurological fact to improve education systems.  This is not as simple as it seems because schools have gathered students into heterogenous groups which present a knowledge base in a step by step process that benefit some learners but not all learners. Stakeholders in this  process are entrenched in this paradigm and reluctant to change.   How to break through this traditional learning paradigm is the focus of the book.

The argument that schools are designed for standardization and can not meet the needs of all learners leads to the discussion of student-centric schools where learning is customized for each student.  Which fits nicely into the concept of differentiation.  The authors believe that if schools are to educate every student then they must begin moving toward the student centric model and away from the monolithic batch process with all its interdependencies.  They further believe that computer based learning is an emerging disruptive force that will accelerate this movement.

The theory of disruptive innovation is that innovations improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by lowering price or designing for a different set of consumers.  This is opposed to sustaining innovations which in the case of education is the monolithic standardized system that exists today. 

The authors believe that as in the private sector, schools have continually had their goals changed.  But unlike the private sector they must create new products from within the existing paradigm because they are a monopoly making it difficult for new models to compete on the changing goals.  Schools, according to the authors, have been given four primary aims over the history of the United States. These arep preserve the democracy and inculcate Democratic values, provide something for every students, keep America competitive, and more recently eliminate Poverty  Traces of all of the goals can be found in our current system and each goal has been met by teachers and administrators who want to improve the system.  Today, however, the game has changed.  Computers are the change agent and learners are different because of their familiarity with the digital world of knowledge.

Schools have been purchasing computers and using them to sustain and marginally improve the way they already teach and run schools. This has not led to significant change in how education systems work and can not do so until computer based learning disrupts the instructional job of teachers in a positive way by creating student-centric learning systems allowing teachers opportunities to give more individual attention to those they teach.

The example from industry that illustrates how this can be done is Apple computers.  When Apple came on the scene computers were large, specialized, expensive machines that were beyond the understanding and budgets of most individuals.  The sustaining innovation was for large corporations to continue making money selling these machines to large businesses.  Apple disrupted this paradigm by marketing the computer as a toy for children.  The main rule of disruptive innovation is that to succeed it must be applied to applications where the alternative is nothing.  Just like Apple, they provided computers to people who would never have been able to afford any of the computers on the market prior to Apple.

In education the computer is disruptive when it provides opportunities for students for whom there was no alternative.  If a student wants to take Chinese and there is not a teacher at the school to teach it, disruptive innovation can create a product for that student.  This is already happening throughout our schools.  It is up to the policy makers and administrators to encourage this growth as in Florida and Minnesota where virtual schools are growing much faster than anticipated and providing opportunties for students whose individual needs are not being met by the standardized operations of the typical school.

The reason that a large investment in computers in schools has not created a better education system is because we are using computers to do more of the same type teaching, didactic instruction.  Computers will become disruptive as they begin to replace this type of instruction.  That means finding places in the standardized model for which there is a demand but limited opportunities to meed that demand.  School administrators and teachers must be looking for opportunities to provide computer based learning to students who want to take classes that schools can not provide.  AP, specialized courses like language, recovery credit, and small and rural districts with limited resources are some of the ways technology have begun meeting the needs of students.

As the model of sudent centric learning takes hold in schools it will lead to better software.  At first the software will be expensive and mirror the dominant learning styles in the classrooms.  The authors believe that experience in industry and business demonstrates that a second stage will follow where software will be developed by teachers to meet individual learning needs.  There is a vast untapped area of non consumption or needs with no alternative that computer learning technology will fill and create a student-centric project based learning models that will cause the technolgoy to disrupt the standardized education models of today.

Experience in industry and business show that four factors will drive this disruption and change education.
1.  Computer based learning will keep improving
2.  The ability of computer based learning to create differentiated learning pathways.
3.  The upcoming teacher shortage.
4.  Costs will fall as the market accelerates.

The outcome of this change will alter the dynamic of teaching and change the pedagogy.  As students engage the knowledge base in computer based programs, teacher will have become learning coaches and tutors spending most of their time moving from student to student encouraging and helping learning rather than delivering one-size-fits-all lectures.  Teachers will need to be more cognizant of student needs and learning styles than they are today.  Assessment will become instant and instructive.  Students will know exactly what they need to do to be successful using computer learning technology.  Mastery learning will become the accepted model of learning and there student will repeat lessons in different ways in order to master the information.  Teachers will also know exactly what students need in order to help them.  This type of teaching will be much closer to the 19th century model of the one-room school house than the enormous learning institutions that have developed during the 20th century.  Under this system students can be evaluated by how far they have moved through a body of knowledge rather than what per centage of the knowledge they have mastered.

The authors call for a transformation of education through disruptive technoloty.  They envision chartered schools as laboratories where needed changes can begin and spread throughout the system.  This is an important book that educators must read and consider.  It is a warning to public schools that if they are to survive they must adopt a different way of doing business.

Throw the Bums Out! There are more players than just teachers

I like to listen to talk radio and frequently tune in different station to hear all sides of the daily whine.  The car radio was tuned to a local station and a moderator and guest were discussing various societal problems.  When they discussed education, the guest began the rhetoric of scapegoating teachers.  The message this man sent out was that our schools are in ruins and it is the fault of the teachers, so we have to create vouchers, and charters to move improve education.

There is a persistent drumbeat in the media causing us to believe all our schools are failing and the way to solve the problem is to get rid of the teachers.  My experiences as an educator leads me to believe that this is a very simplistic solution.  Certainly there are bad schools and certainly there are bad teachers but to label all students as poorly educated and all teachers as bad misses the mark at the heart of the problem.

My experience is that most teachers are dedicated professionals trying to help as many students as they can.  Most students want to succeed and usually behave like adolescents in pursuit of that goal. What I find interesting about the debate is that since I began teaching in 1975 nothing has substantially changed.  At that time schools were failing, students were not going to be able to succeed in life, other countries were ahead of us in test scores,  and teachers were the problem.  It is hard to believe that adults today have the thinking skills to evaluate the problems  of education, that they do is a testament to the fact that somehow they were able to make meaning of their educations despite the fact it was so bad.

I believe that part of the problem is that most children did not like being told what they had to do and blamed their teachers for their unhappiness at having to go to school.  I think that is the root of the problem.  Many people remember their education from negative emotional memories.  This can be solved by making schools a happier environment.  I believe that being kind and respectful to all students can go a long way toward achieving the goal of children being happy about going to school.  When they first started school that is how they felt.  Educational institutions should strive to create environments of wonder and awe.

What about the bad teachers?  There are some, but I do not believe that you can find them by looking at their student test scores.  Education is a cooperative, collaborative process with many stakeholders and they all have a hand in the success or failure of each child.  Parents,  administrators, teachers, education aides, school boards, unions, substitute teachers, state legislators, and federal administrators are some of the stakeholders in this process.  How do we evaluate their responsibility for the system failures and successes?

My real question is how do bad teachers get to the classroom?  Maybe we should evaluate that system as opposed to scapegoating the teachers.  How does a bad teacher get a degree in education?  What role does the hiring process play in putting bad teachers in the classroom?  Why can't certification processes be better filters of good and bad teachers? Why aren't "bad" teachers identified early in the evaluation process, given guidance, and mentored?  Certainly a contract can be negotiated with teacher's unions that recognizes the importance of working together for the best interests of the children.

Our adversarial, competitiveness drives the school systems.  These are not 21st skills, they are 19th century skills.  Today it is more important than ever that we show our children how collaboration and cooperation drive teams to win.  The United States is a team and if we truly believe that our children are important we need to demonstrate the best traits of competition, not the worst.  Throwing out teachers is not the answer to reforming education!